Minute 03: Be Busy When You're Busy
This episode dropped on March 24, 2020 and was 1 minute 44 seconds long. You can get the podcast episode here.
When it comes to freelance work, it’s feast or famine, right?
But what if we could level out those peaks and valleys? We can, if we time things correctly.
While it would be great to have wall-to-wall work and steady income solely from our social media marketing and referrals, it’s just not the case, right?
And as soon as we finish a project or a contract, if we don’t already have another lined up, we’re essentially unemployed.
This is where sales and marketing activity can help us, but not necessarily when we think it will.
When we are at our busiest with client work is also when we should be active with our sales and marketing tasks.
Why? Shouldn’t we focus on the task at hand (the client’s project) and wait until we’re done to move on to other things? Or at least spend less time on sales activities until we have more time? After all, we landed the client, let’s focus on them.
While I would agree that we may not be able to keep our sales activity at a fever pitch while working on a project, we can’t ramp it down too much, and here’s why:
How long is your sales cycle?
In a future podcast and show notes I’ll be going into the sales process, but here’s a preview: one key metric that you should be keenly aware of is the average length of time from prospect to client.
How long does it take, on average, from when you first make outreach to a brand new potential client to when they respond to your communication? How about for a referral or an existing client?
How long does it take from when they finally respond to your communication to when they agree to that pitch meeting or RFP/RFQ? How long does it take from when you make that pitch until they make a decision as to whether to hire you or not? How long from the end of a project until you get your check?
And, of course, let’s not even talk about project delays. They never happen right? Every project starts exactly when the client says it will, and it never takes longer to approve than what they said. </sarcasm>
This [the time line] will vary greatly between industries, client sizes, and individual freelancers. There’s no right or wrong answer, there is only a number. It’s OK that this number is an estimate. But we need to know that number.
If we wait until the end, or until the very end of a project to start ramping up our sales and marketing efforts, that’s when we’ll see those income valleys.
Here’s an over-simplified example:
The black line represents when the project payment arrives, and our available income over time. The red line represents our sales and marketing activity.
In this model, we wait until the project we’re working on is nearly complete before ramping up our sales and marketing instead of keeping it steady throughout. While working on projects, we drop our sales and marketing activity down.
In this case (again, overly simplified to illustrate a point) we see a lull between client projects. That makes for some stressful weeks or months, doesn’t it? Get ready to add “Commissions Open” to your Twitter handle.
Here’s how to fix it
Model 2 is the same amount of average activity but this time we’re keeping it steadier throughout the project:
Now, conversely, if we keep a more steady activity level while working (higher than what I’m showing in the previous model) and ramp things up a bit (but not nearly as much) in between gigs, we can see that the client projects come in more consistently, or rather, with less time in between.
The Takeaway
Here’s what I’m trying to illustrate: if we keep the same average amount of activity between the two models, but keep it steadier as opposed to bouncing it up and down, we can essentially increase our client revenue without changing anything else. It’s not that it’s shortening the time it takes to acquire a new customer, it’s that we’re starting the process sooner.
Don’t feel bad about this, and here’s why: every sales team I’ve managed, at some point or another, has done this. They would start working on a big sale (or several smaller sales) and all other activity would fall by the wayside until they were done with the sale, win or lose*. And whether it closed or not, they would be in the same boat: in a trough between commission checks while they ramped up their activity again.
I did have a couple of reps that, no matter what, kept essentially the same activity level regardless of what deals they were working on.
When things got especially busy during one complicated international deal we were brokering, my rep in charge of it saw a slight dip in his activity (by “slight”, I mean he logged 150 emails and calls instead of his usual 180 that week). The upshot was that he always or almost always made his goal every month.
Now, these are professional sales people who’s only job is to sell things that are making the same mistakes, so we can be forgiven for the same sins, I feel. But we can also fix it.
When we started measuring their activity level, and measured their average time of acquisition, they started seeing an immediate improvement in their monthly numbers. They kept the same number of activities, on average, but steadier in their distribution. Nothing else had to change to see that initial bump.
I’m not saying that this is an easy thing; far from it. We’re responsible for not just selling ourselves, but also making things, and those things take time to make. That said, with organization and understanding our own process for getting clients, we can create a plan that will make this a much less stressful thing. That’s coming up in a future podcast.
* Don’t even get me started on putting all of your eggs in one basket. I’ve seen this with professional sales reps as well. Wait, actually, I will get started on this. Again, future podcast.